1943: The Little Prince is published. New Orleans Opera Association formed. Norman Rockwell’s Rosie the Riveter appears on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. Duke Ellington plays at Carnegie Hall. First US air raid against Germany.
She walks over to the porch railing and leans against it. “See that beautiful blue sky? I line everybody up there, each day, Mama, Daddy, Earl, Donald, Pearl, Edith. All of them. Like they’re waiting for me. I don’t know why I’m still here. I don’t understand it. You see all those movies with people up in heaven. But nobody knows. You just have to wait until you die and see for yourself. I didn’t want to lose my mother, or Pearl. I’d like to see them again. But nobody knows.”
A boat comes into view from the direction of the Gulf, a pontoon boat with a couple and two children. The children wave and she waves back. The osprey lifts off its perch, and its shadow reaches the water before it opens its wings and soars above the surface of the bayou.
“They were taking so many boys that all the girls could get the jobs. The girls waited in long lines for jobs. Loved putting those dollar bills in Mama’s hand. I worked at the Naval Air Base on the lake. That’s how I met your Daddy. Ruby. I knew her from the base.”
In 1942 she began a correspondence with a sailor whom she’d never met. They had a mutual friend. You will probably be the most surprised girl in N.O. when you receive this letter. You can blame it on a friend of yours, she says that she thinks you are so nice…as far as talking and dancing or maybe being a sailor, I think I am ok, but when it comes to letter writing I would make a better ditch digger.
“There was a big school at the base. It’s on the lake, where that college is now. It was some kind of naval training school. So many handsome boys. They were just teaching those boys how to go off and get killed. All of them taking off in planes and we knew some of them weren’t coming back.”
The letters go on for three years, dozens of them, eventually filled with hope and longing. It won’t be long now, my darling, or Here I am again at midnight, for our visit, missing you more each day.
1945: Debut of Caspar the friendly ghost. Moisant International Airport opens in New Orleans. Anne Frank dies at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, war with Japan ends, September.
“I’ll never forget when I heard about those camps. We couldn’t believe it. Walked around in a daze. Crying. Praying. Horrible pictures. You just don’t want to believe it. Then the boys were coming home.”
A brief meeting during a Christmas furlough came in 1943 and two more years of letters. Then after months of sitting on a ship waiting for news of Japan’s surrender, the war was over and he was headed for California. An engagement ring arrived in the mail on General Taylor Street in 1945, and he was back at home soon after.
“I had hay fever the day he got back. At the train station in New Orleans so Pearl and Miriam went. I think he was disappointed that it turned out I wasn’t one of them. They were so beautiful. Then Pearl and Miriam ended up marrying his two buddies. Two he met on the train. Brothers. You remember, Uncle Louis and Uncle Garrett?”
But only a few months after the engagement, something happened.
“I don’t know what to call it. It was like a shock. I felt so happy. I just knew I wanted to be a nun. Ran home after work so excited to tell everybody. The Poor Claire’s. That’s what I wanted. Cloistered.”
She broke the news to him as he lay in a hospital bed for minor surgery. “Your Daddy, poor man, he said, ‘why does everything happen to me.’ He was at the Veterans hospital getting his eye operated on. Mama was so upset. ‘You can’t be a nun; you love babies too much!’ I thought she would be happy. But Daddy, my daddy, he quit drinking when he heard. I can’t believe that.”
Their families conspired to get her to change her mind. “They brought him over. In his dress blues. It was that, I guess, and that red wavy hair. He kept it short after that and I never saw it again. Of course, I can’t say I regret anything because I wouldn’t have my children if I was a nun. He had a lot of good qualities. He was a good man.” They were married December 1, 1945.
She opens the door to go back inside and presses her back against the doorframe. “Do you do this? For a straight back. The nuns used to say, look at Marjorie, sit like Marjorie.”
Her oak table is where life is lived now, seated in a hard straight-backed chair. A little bit of make-up, bobby pins to hold back the white hair on her neck, moderate amounts of sweets, caffeine, and, lately, wine.
“You’re still working on your book, aren’t you? Don’t give up. It can take a long time to get published.” She cuts an orange into four wedges and works her teeth into the flesh. “You don’t like oranges? I love oranges. Do you peel them? A lot of people peel them, but I don’t. I like to scrape the white part off with my teeth. Do you think it’s bad for you?” She stares at the TV and eats.
“I wrote for the school paper. That’s what I wanted, to be a journalist. I typed some of my stories with a Royal typewriter. Loved to type. I was pretty fast, too.” The orange wedges are scraped clean.
A T-Mobile ad comes on the TV with some upbeat electronic music. She does a little jiggly dance in her chair. “Do you dance by yourself sometimes? I do. Right here in the kitchen. Nobody can see me. Sometimes you have to dance.”
She stares at the quiet TV and picks up stray pieces of orange peel. She changes the channel with the remote. “We can put on a movie. See if there’s a good movie on. I’m glad we get to talk as much as we do. I wish I could have talked to Mama like we talk. Poor Mama. She was always so busy. And so tired.” She shakes her head back and forth. “Having a baby in the room next to your dead child.”
The scraps under the placemat come out again for perusal, one by one. Scraps of life, bits of memory, this one life among many, each one with its own scraps, its own bits of memory that will matter to the biographer going through them for clues. They also matter to a world trying to comprehend itself, a world collecting scraps and bits to put together a true story of humanity, not a list of battles and presidents, epidemics and revolutions.
In the early evening a great blue heron barks and the porch is on fire with the sunset. A small wood fishing boat heads back from the Gulf and startles the heron. The broad wings open as the huge bird lifts off and its shadow crosses the bayou. The light is almost gone and the osprey remains as a sentry on its branch high above the water.
Jazz drifts out again onto the porch. Pete Fountain’s melancholy clarinet. The shade on the glass door is open. She’s dancing with her eyes closed and one hand resting on the back of the chair. The other arm is extended and her hand floats at her waist, the long, curled fingers open to the ceiling.